SpaceX will send five Starships to Mars in 2026 and Starlink will pay for it

Elon Musk pegged Starlink satellite Internet subscribers as investors in the future of humanity, as its sales are apparently the main funding source of the SpaceX Starship program that will be used for getting to Mars.

"If you look closely at your Starlink router, you will notice that it has an illustration of the Earth-Mars transfer orbit," reiterates Elon.

When the planets are suitably aligned some time in 2026, SpaceX will launch five Starships on its first test mission to Mars. Previously, Musk only pegged 2026 and 2028 as suitable years for launching unmanned or crewed flights to Mars, respectively, without any specifics.

Now that the Polaris Dawn mission and the test of the Extravehicular Activity (EVA) space suit have been completed successfully, however, Elon is more talkative about SpaceX's Mars colonization plans.

Apparently, SpaceX is not afraid of initial failure, as Musk confirms that the interplanetary Starships will keep coming to Mars regardless of what happens with previous landings until a critical mass of "thousands" is reached. Previously, he pegged Mars colonization within a 20-year timeframe, which is now set to start in 2026.

If all goes well with the first five Starships sent to the Red Planet that year, SpaceX will prepare for the first manned flight to Mars at the next available opportunity in 2028.Elon is now even urging risk-takers to participate, with the rallying cry that SpaceX will "enable anyone who wants to be a space traveler to go to Mars!"

The fundamental existential question is whether humanity becomes sustainably multiplanetary before something happens on Earth to prevent that, for example nuclear war, a supervirus or population collapse that weakens civilization to the point where it loses the ability to send supply ships to Mars.

These are rather ambitious plans that hinge on a lot of uncertainties and, needless to say, Elon is now painting government bureaucracy and red tape as the only obstacles before the survival of humanity via the colonization of Mars before some epic disaster strikes Earth.

"This is a fork, maybe the fork, in the road of human destiny," he waxes poetic, all the while advocating againstbureaucracy that "would destroy the Mars program and doom humanity." Positioning Starlink as the main source of money for the Mars mission that will ensure the future of human consciousness is one way to advance SpaceX's Starlink satellite launch targetsthat are facing legal and regulatory hurdles.

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